This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
If we pretend to have reached either perfection or satisfaction, we have degraded ourselves and our work.
Perfection | Work |
Obedience is, indeed, founded on a kind of freedom, else it would become mere subjugation, but that freedom is only granted that obedience may be more perfect; and thus while a measure of license is necessary to exhibit the individual energies of things, the fairness and pleasantness and perfection of them all consist in their restraint.
Fairness | Freedom | Individual | Obedience | Perfection | Restraint |
Charity is the perfection and ornament of religion.
Charity | Perfection | Religion |
A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search for truth and perfection is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life... Variation, experiment and insurgence are all of them attributes of freedom.
Beauty | Contemplation | Day | Experiment | Freedom | Life | Life | Mystery | Perfection | Poverty | Search | Sound | Truth | Contemplation |
Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
Aim at perfection in everything, though in most things it is unattainable; however, they who aim at it, and persevere, will come much nearer it than those whose laziness and despondency make them give it up as unattainable.
Despondency | Laziness | Perfection | Will |
Max Lerner, fully Maxwell "Max" Alan Lerner, aka Mikhail Lerner
We demand of our political life greater certainty and greater perfection than we demand of our personal life.
Life | Life | Perfection |
Meister Eckhart, formally Meister von Hochheim
There is nothing to test the perfection of love better than trust. Wholehearted love for another person carries confidence with it. Whatever one dares to trust God for, he really finds in God and a thousand times more.
Better | Confidence | God | Love | Nothing | Perfection | Trust | God |
The perfection of any matter, the highest or the lowest, touches on the divine.
To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species. The essence of man is imperfection. Imperfection and blazing contradictions - between mixed good and evil, altruism and selfishness, co-operativeness and combativeness, optimism and fatalism, affirmation and negation.
Altruism | Evil | Good | Imperfection | Man | Need | Optimism | Perfection | Selfishness |
Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is.
Man | Perfection |
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
The urge to do and be that which is the noblest, the most beautiful of which we are capable, is the creative impulse of every high achievement. We strive for perfection here because we long to be restored to our oneness with God.
Achievement | God | Impulse | Oneness | Perfection |
The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. Thus in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God.
Action | God | Good | Heart | Insight | Intuition | Justice | Man | Perfection | Purity | Sentiment | Soul | Space | Time |
Self-reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God.
God | Man | Perfection | Self | Self-reliance |
Benjamin Collins Brodie, fully Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie, 1st Baronet
Our minds are so constructed that we can keep the attention fixed on a particular object until we have, as it were, looked all around it; and the mind that possesses this faculty in the highest degree of perfection will take cognizance of relations of which another mind has no perception. It is this, much more than any difference in the abstract power of reasoning, which constitutes the vast difference between the minds of different individuals. This is the history alike of the poetic genius and of the genius of discovery in science. “I keep the subject,” said Sir Isaac Newton, “constantly before me, and wait until the dawnings open by little and little into a full light.” It was thus that after long meditation he was led to the invention of fluxions, and to the anticipation of the modern discovery of the combustibility of the diamond. It was thus that Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood, and that those views were suggested by Davy which laid the foundation of that grand series of experimental researches which terminated in the decomposition of the earths and alkalies.
Abstract | Age | Ambition | Anticipation | Attention | Contentment | Death | Discovery | Disease | Ennui | Failure | Genius | History | Indolence | Intelligence | Invention | Little | Meditation | Men | Mind | Object | Old age | Perfection | Power | Will | Discovery |
Philip Sidney, fully Sir Philip Sidney
To be ambitious of true honor and of the real glory and perfection of our nature is the very principle and incentive of virtue; but to be ambitious of titles, place, ceremonial respects, and civil pageantry, is as vain and little as the things are which we court.
Glory | Honor | Little | Nature | Perfection | Virtue | Virtue |
Reality has three natures: imagination, interdependence, and the nature of ultimate perfection One considers interdependence. Because of forgetfulness and prejudices, we generally cloak reality with a veil of false views and opinions. This is seeing reality through imagination. Imagination is an illusion of reality which conceives of reality as an assembly of small pieces of separate entities and selves.
Forgetfulness | Illusion | Imagination | Nature | Perfection | Reality |
We can end the impossible quest for the perfect structure - the happy family, the completely satisfying marriage, the unbroken friendship. We can find some purpose in the failures, the intimacies that never got off the ground, the possibilities that never took flesh. The soul does not share the spirit’s love of perfection and wholeness, but finds value in fragmentation, incompleteness, and unfulfilled promise.
Family | Happy | Love | Marriage | Perfection | Promise | Purpose | Purpose | Soul | Spirit | Wholeness | Value |
The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of the life, or of the work, and if it take the second must refuse a heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.